Andrew Coyne: We’re all hypocrites now

OTTAWA — There are a number of bad arguments against approving the CNOOC takeover of Nexen, or more broadly opening the door to investment between China and Canada, as under a recently signed bilateral treaty: that CNOOC is state-owned, that China does not offer reciprocal treatment to Canadian investors, that Canada might be obliged to compensate Chinese investors for expropriating their assets, and so on.

But amid the welter of pseudo-economic arguments there is another, avowedly non-economic objection that is rather harder to dismiss: simply, that we are consorting with monsters. Though far removed from the psychosis of Maoism, the Chinese regime remains among the world’s more brutal dictatorships, with a record of torture, imprisonment without trial, and persecution of minorities that shames the senses, even without the steamrollering of Tibet.

By permitting Canadians to do business there, as much as by allowing Chinese firms to do business here, we are arguably signalling our acquiescence in, if not approval of, this behaviour. Certainly we are signalling there will be no economic price to be paid for it: you may mistreat innocent human beings on a mass scale — jail them, beat them, pluck their eyes out if you like — and commerce will flourish between us undiminished.

At the worst, we are encouraging, if not enabling these atrocities. At best, we are complicit in them. Yet what are we to do? We are not going to change China on our own. Were Canada to refuse to do business with China, it would not alter its behaviour one whit. Perhaps if the whole world were to do so, but no one is about to organize an international boycott campaign. China is too big, too strategic, too … lucrative. We might recover a measure of self-respect by boycotting China on our own, but that is all it would achieve, at considerable cost to our economic interests. On the other hand, well, what price self-respect?

You can see the political parties wrestling unhappily with this dilemma. Some of the NDP’s hostility to the CNOOC takeover is undoubtedly an expression of a more generalized unease with China. But to block the CNOOC deal on those grounds would invite the question: what about the rest of our economic relationship with China? If we are too high-minded to take their money when it comes to private oil companies, what about government bonds? How about all those low-priced consumer goods we buy from them? If moral concerns are to trump economic, we are obliged to foot the bill ourselves, not leave it all to the shareholders in Nexen.

But nobody wants to go there. Or rather, everybody wants to go there, without actually going there. The leak of a new foreign policy plan, albeit only a draft, that put economic interests, especially in Asia, squarely ahead of human rights concerns (the government, it said, should “pursue political relationships in tandem with economic interests even where political interests or values may not align”) prompted the NDP leader to loud protests. “For generations,” Tom Mulcair thundered in Parliament, “Canada has been a voice for peace and democracy in the world, but the prime minister is abandoning that proud legacy.”

The Conservatives’ new trade-before-rights stance, of course, is particularly galling, given their previous coolness towards China, explicitly on human rights grounds. It was Stephen Harper, you remember, who in his first year in office said, “I don’t think Canadians want us to sell out important Canadian values, our belief in democracy, freedom, human rights. They don’t want to sell that out to the almighty dollar.”

Yes, he did say that: and was pilloried by the opposition and much of the media for it. When at last the prime minister, bowing to the business and foreign-policy establishment, adjusted his position, they were still nearly hysterical. We had offended the Chinese leadership! We would be cut out of the Chinese gold rush!

On his first visit to Beijing in December 2009, after Harper was publicly snubbed by the Chinese premier (“five years is too long a time”), the opposition leaders rushed to the side of … the Chinese premier. “We’ve all had a wake-up call in Canada about how important China is and Mr. Harper has taken a very long time to wake up,” Michael Ignatieff despaired. The late Jack Layton implored Harper not to criticize China’s human rights record, noting: “I think you always have to be careful when you live in a glass house when it comes to throwing stones.”

When it comes to China, in other words, we are all hypocrites now. Of course, nothing says we can’t have it both ways: trade with China, yet also press them to improve their human rights record. And, indeed, that’s what every political leader professes to believe. To the NDP leader’s call for an “even-handed” approach, Harper replied that’s just what his was aimed at: “creating prosperity, promoting peace and security and our democratic values.”

Funny, that’s not how we approached, say, South Africa under apartheid. Then, we simply cut off all trade with them. For that matter, it’s not how we approached the Cuban dictatorship, either, with whom we were content to trade without the slightest pretence of concern for human rights. Maybe we’ve evolved a more sophisticated, nuanced approach. Maybe every situation is different. Or maybe we have simply learned to rationalize our self-interest.

Deep down, I think we all know that lectures on human rights are likely to have no more impact on the Chinese leadership than boycotting their exports. It may soothe our restless consciences, but the reason we choose to trade with China is not because we hope to make them more like us, but because, as the man said, that’s where the money is.

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